Download SpamPal 1.72g beta

James Farmer released a new beta release of his anti-spam solution for Windows SpamPal a few days ago. The version number has arrived at 1.72g and the program can be downloaded as installer or in zip format† This program sits as it were between the e-mail client and the provider and checks the incoming mail. If spam is detected it will be marked as such. This marking can then be used to create a filter that, for example, puts this e-mail in a separate folder or immediately throws it away. This release includes the following impressive list of changes:

New Features

• When SpamPal crashes, users now have the option to automatically send a report to the developer.
• New option in “Appearance” screen to not show SpamPal icon in system tray
• You can now choose to add the X-Padding: header at the top or at the bottom of the message headers.

Mail Filtering

• Local blacklistings were being overridden by positive DNSBL query results – fixed.
• Spam was sometimes wrongly let through if one or more ignorelists of providers were selected – fixed.
• SpamPal was reporting it supported certain IMAP4 extensions when it doesn’t – fixed.
• POP3 & SMTP: Wasn’t correctly implementing the part of the RFCs regarding doubling the termination octet if it appeared at the start of a line containing data. Fixed.
• Body-filtering was not being performed if any enabled plugin had failed to load; fixed.

Transparent Proxy

• Fiddled with code to prevent lsass.exe going haywire after coming out of hibernation.
• SpamPalLSP.dll no longer calls OpenThread() – this function is not supported on Win9x and was preventing transparent proxy from loading on this OS!
• Tweaks to how “data available to read” messages are sent by transparent proxy
• Fixed problem with Layered Service Provider not always installing transparent proxy correctly following a fresh install of SpamPal.
• Rewritten overlapped-operation-handling code – should be more robust now.
• Increased period of time transparent proxy will spend waiting for shared resources to become free – might help alleviate the problem of occaisional mail fetches being “missed” by SpamPal.
• Transparent Proxy: More tweaks to how events are retained & discarded when WSPEventSelect is called a second time when there are unfetched events known. This seemingly innocuous code has lots of obsure, hard-to-track-down bugs.
• was hanging when the application tried to close a socket that was still being filtered by SpamPal; fixed.
• Added support for the following Microsoft Winsock extensions: WSARecvMsg, TransmitPackets, ConnectEx, DisconnectEx
• Rare set of circumstances could result in SpamPal reading more data than it should and corrupting input stream; fixed

Update checking

• SpamPal update-checking will now only tell you about new versions of plugins that you have installed – it will no longer tell you about new plugins that are released. (This was broken and frequently advised new users to install all plugins, even though it shouldn’t have.)
• Tweaks to update checking routine.

Installation/Initial Setup

• The settings you configure from the Welcome window are now only saved when you click “Finish”.
• LSP install progress window now scrolls to always show the bottom line.
• Programs menu group should now get created in All Users menu where appropriate (if installed by Windows NT administrator account and group doesn’t already exist in user’s programs menu).

User Interface

• Added a keyboard shortcut to options window to switch focus to tree of options screens.
• When prefetching, a second row will appear in the status window giving information on the state of the prefetch thread.
• Resolved mailserver name should appear in prefetch row of status window rather than IP address.
• Should no longer auto-open status window at startup if you’ve ended up with two SpamPal shortcuts in your startup group.
• Now tries to recreate SpamPal tray icon after Windows 2000/NT/XP startup completes – might help those for whom the SpamPal tray icon doesn’t get created.
• “Interface” screen of options window renamed “Appearance”
• New option in “Appearance” screen to not create status window rows for prefetch threads.
• Modified method by which some parts of the status window are updated; should be slightly more efficient now.
• Fix: Possibly fixed the cause of the occaisional annoying crashes when closing the configuration dialog

misc

• When you created a transparent proxy SMTP port in SpamPal, the unused relay permissions lists got filled in with “(null)”. Fixed.
• Should now output an error message if a plugin fails to load.
• Fixed very obscure bug that sometimes caused SpamPal to freeze up entirely if configuration was reloaded while messages were being filtered.
• Fixed v.small memory leak in options window validation code.
• Fixed v.minor buffer overflow in auto-whitelist-logfile-updating code.
• More code changes to make it easier for me to add new configuration settings.
• SpamPal should no longer crash if it encounters a corrupted hostname lookup file or auto-whitelist-pending-data file in its configuration folder.
• Upgrades from pre-v1.70 had become broken at some point – protocol was getting reset to “POP3” for all configured ports. Fixed.
• Application wouldn’t run at startup if a SpamPal service was configured for manual start; fixed.
• Fix: GUI client wasn’t correctly detecting service during startup, and was starting as application instead.
• Old-style (specific servername & multiple servername) ports should now continue to work after adding/removing SpamPal layered service provider, without the need to restart SpamPal to get them going again.
• POP3: Sometimes crashed at end of session because session info was deallocated before status row deleted; fixed.
• No longer performs housekeeping operations more frequently than once every five minutes.
• Will use getaddrinfo() function on Windows XP rather than gethostbyname()
• Made changes to DNSBL thread synchronization in an effort to guard against deadlock.
• Now contains assertion code to log suspected failures (debug-logging build will abort if an assertion fails).
• Removed small memory leak from new-LSP-connection handler on SpamPal side of things.
• Includes code to automatically detect deadlock bugs.
• No longer possible for two threads to be conducting housekeeping operations at the same time.
• Threads were sometimes getting blocked because critical section was held by low-priority housekeeping thread. Fixed.
• When GUI client crashes, should no longer complain about trying to access the logfile as well!
• Should hopefully no longer report “Filing error (no error)” when opening protocol logfiles when lots of mail sessions all start at once.

Plugins

• A couple of plugin API calls weren’t locating decorated function names as expected – this led to weird effects like some plugin version numbers appearing in the options dialog but not in a crash report. Fixed.
• Now outputs a warning if you try to run the Bayesian plugin with the SpamPal service.
• Status window now displays when plugin is being initialized (fetchStart or sessionStart)
• Plugin API additions: “PluginCapabiltiesEx” structure and “getPluginCapabilitiesEx” function can be used instead of “PluginCapabilities” and “getPluginCapabilities” – these allow plugins to opt-out of prefetching.

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